Christmas at the Ministry, 1940

In this post, project fellow Hollie Price looks at how the Ministry used Christmas to project British resolve abroad and soften American opinion to the war.

In 1940, during a particularly harsh winter and in the midst of ongoing air raids, the Ministry’s Films Division began planning a number of Christmas film projects. One of them, Christmas under Fire, was to be directed by Harry Watt. The aim was to continue the theme of the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit’s hugely successful documentary London Can Take It (1940), an account of everyday life’s endurance in wartime London. At the time the US remained neutral in the war so the film was made specifically for American audiences, to show them that Christmas celebrations were carrying on in Britain despite the Blitz, thus proving a spirit of national cohesion and persuading US audiences of the strength of the Allied war effort.

In November 1940, the GPO Film Unit
began preparations. In order that it could be previewed in December and
dispatched to the US not long after Christmas (it was released in January 1941),
Christmas under Fire was completed in
a hurry without financial authorisation.[1]
In Harry Watt’s autobiography, he describes: ‘They [the Ministry] said what was
needed was something to make the American public uncomfortable while they
celebrated Christmas’.[2]
According to Watt, he and Quentin Reynolds – the London correspondent of Collier’s Weekly who had provided the
commentary for London Can Take It –
had ‘decided, very much tongue in cheek, to make a weepy’.[3]

In an anonymous proposal (quite
possibly written by Watt), the ‘Christmas Film’ is described as ‘ideal film
material for the super-sentimentalists in the United States […] a film timed to
be released right after Christmas, showing Britain carrying on the tradition in
its dugouts and outposts is an obvious tear-jerker’.[4]
The proposal details the ‘curious juxtaposition’ between ‘people settling down
into their enforced trogloditic [sic] existence’ in underground air raid
shelters while also ‘thinking about Christmas’ and ‘how they are going to
celebrate the festival of peace and goodwill toward men while death and hate
threaten from above’.[5]

Reynolds’ proposed commentary aimed to
illuminate the differences between the festivities in wartime Britain and those
enjoyed in peacetime America in 1940. His early draft put English children and
their experiences of war and Christmas centre-stage:

During the first months of the war and during the first weeks
of the blitzkrieg there was a general conspiracy in England to keep children in
ignorance of what was going on … It wasn’t long before the children of England
knew what the country was at war … Today the children are junior partners in
this great partnership of thirty-five million people who are fighting to save a
civilisation.[6]

Reynolds presented Christmas as a way
of paying back the children for their role in the collective endeavours of
wartime:

The whole nation has decided to repay these gallant little
junior partners by making their own holiday – Christmas – the same holiday it
has always been. Bombs will fall on Christmas Eve; the No Man’s Land will be as
active as ever, but the parents of England have decided that to their children,
it will be the same old fashioned Christmas they have always known.[7]

The GPO Film Unit used the idea of the
children’s ‘old fashioned Christmas’ to plot the visual narrative of an early
sequence in the film, which shows a group of young evacuees collecting holly
and mistletoe on a wooded slope in the countryside.[8]
The sequence begins with a static shot of a peaceful village scene, before showing
children collecting holly in a tree, and running down a hill laden with bundles
of branches. Just as the voiceover describes
‘so far as possible this will be an old fashioned Christmas in England, at
least for the children’, the camera tracks back to show the children running
down the wooded slope towards the village. This long shot dwells on the
children’s collective work, capturing Reynolds’ description of the children’s
contributions to the war. It also presents the idyllic rural scene as a
picture-postcard view of the ‘old fashioned Christmas’ characterised by
pastoral imagery and associations with Englishness and tradition.

Reynolds’ commentary was redrafted a
number of times with the input of John Betjeman (based at the Ministry),
Wolfgang Wilhelm (a German émigré scriptwriter employed for his services on the
film) and Harry Watt.[9]
In the final film, the ‘curious juxtaposition’ of wartime and Christmas came to
play a greater role in both the commentary and the film’s visual style. On one
draft addressed to Watt from Reynolds, noted in pencil are the lines: ‘And so
it will be a Xmas of contrasts. Holly and barbed wire. Guns and presents’.[10]

The ‘Xmas of contrasts’ is illustrated
by several dramatic images of the everyday landscape in wartime, including jarring
juxtapositions of Christmas decorations and objects associated with the war
effort. A line of barbed wire caught in a holly bush is silhouetted against a
pale sky,and tinsel is draped over
a row of iron railings – with a warden’s helmet hanging from one end. These
dramatic, surrealist images bear comparison to those popularised by
contemporary photographers like Bill Brandt through publications like Picture Post. Rather than simply
conveying a picture-postcard English Christmas, they establish an uncomfortable,
eerie vision of festivities and the strange endurance of everyday life during
the Blitz, with a visually arresting, observational style.

A note on a later, redrafted script
suggested that this visual depiction of Christmas in wartime was a way of stressing
the endurance of everyday routines, and specifically family life, during the
Blitz: the ‘key note [of the film] is the Reunion of the Family to celebrate
Xmas (‘contrasting the cold blackout of the exterior with the warmth and light
of the interior scenes’).[11]
The ‘Reunion of the Family’ scenes come at the end of a sequence in the film
which was specifically meant to link the experience of Christmas during the war
with images from the Nativity. Several shots show shepherds herding their
sheep, accompanied by Reynold’s voiceover: ‘Today in England even the shepherds
are in some kind of uniform. And they are still watching and guiding’.

The draft treatment for the film
emphasised that ‘careful shooting (composition, lighting, etc) … should give a
strong Christmas feeling and a fairly mystical quality to the final sequence’.[12]
Furthermore, it ‘should be quietly suggestive of all that goes to make up the
Christmas mythology in our minds … the Nativity, Adoration of the Magi, the
Star in the East, the Shepherds that watch by night’.[13]
It was planned that the film’s final sequence should continue this sense of
‘Christmas mythology’ – through shots of the chapel choir of King’s College,
Cambridge singing ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, and of the carol accompanying a sequence set in the air raid shelter at
South Kensington Underground station.

Earlier
versions of the commentary had even made comparisons between the stable in the
Nativity, and contemporary bomb shelters, going as far as to suggest that the
stables in Bethlehem were built ‘so that invaders, thieves could be fought off
more easily’.[14]
Drawing comparisons with the idea that ‘this year England will celebrate
Christmas underground, in shelters, in caves’, Reynolds argues that ‘the first stable at Bethlehem was probably
half underground – something like the shelters of England today, where men
women and children live the better to be protected from the invader’.[15]

Although these comparisons did not
make the final cut of the commentary, the footage of families on the platform
in the underground sequence was planned to ‘suggest the Holy family and the
manger’.[16]
The final sequence seeks to capture a sense of enduring ‘Christmas mythology’
by creating a close association between the Christmas carol and the spirit of
those sheltering in the station, using footage of the tree-adorned platform
crowded with people. As a train pulls out of the station and families tuck
themselves in amongst their belongings, the ‘strong Christmas feeling’ is conveyed
through the lyrical combination of the carol with shots capturing families in
their shared, everyday and yet strange wartime surroundings.

The striking visual narrative of Christmas under Fire was developed
through the collaborative input of the GPO Film Unit and the scriptwriters
employed by the Ministry. The film’s images of Christmas negotiated Watt’s
self-proclaimed sentimental approach but simultaneously presented a restrained,
poetic picture of the festive season in Britain in 1940 ,with an eye for its
‘curious juxtapositions’, idiosyncrasies, and comparisons with seasonal themes
of peace and goodwill. At the time of its preview screenings, Christian Barman
(the Publicity Officer at the London Transport Board) wrote to Kenneth Clark
with ardent praise, suggesting the film’s value as propaganda for the Allied
war effort.

I hate superlatives, but I could swear that never in my life
have I seen a short film that can be compared with it for imagination and
sensitiveness and the sheer deftness of its technique. The finale is truly
astounding […] With people who can do propaganda as good as this, there is no
need to worry any more.[17]

Christmas under Fire is available to watch on the BFI YouTube channel and on the BFI collection
of GPO Film Unit films If War Should Come.

Information and its Communication in Wartime

Senate House, University of London25-26 July 2017

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